Knowledge is Power

Monday, March 11, 2013

I know this must annoy some people out there but this is reaching epidemic proportions and so in the interest of artists everywhere I am going to stay on this until people get it through their thick skulls.

Never work for free. If any for-profit entity asks you to do
something for them you need to charge for your services. Giving them away in
the hopes of getting something later really means you aren't qualified to be
paid in the first place. This means you have to work harder to get your skills
to a professional level. It’s not smart to give them away in the hope no one will notice
it is substandard.

The gallery art market is less prone to this behavior than
illustration and production art because galleries want 40% or 50% to represent
an artist in their shop. Obviously giving things away isn't a sustainable model
under those circumstances

Think about what it
means for illustration though. How does this illustrator pay the bills working
for free? They can’t, they can’t pay anything obviously which means they must work
at another job or depend on someone else to foot the bill while they selfishly
play at their desired profession at other peoples expense.

Art is hard, not everyone can make it as a professional.
Undercutting working wages is not ethical; not by the people who ask you to work
for free or the people who do work for free. Think about that the next time you
think your self-interests are more important than the industry you are helping
to destroy, by giving away services.

Part of the problem here for younger people are that businesses
have abrogated their responsibilities. They operate at such a dysfunctional
level they aren't really professional concerns. Anyone in the digital age can
throw up a website and claim to be a game or VFX studio even though they can’t
actually afford to pay people to work with them. There is a name for this kind
of concern, it is called a hobby. It means because you don’t actually make
enough to sustain yourself you aren't a real business. Maybe someday you will be but until you make
enough money to support yourself you’re an amateur or hobbyist, take your pick.
Your hobby doesn't give you the right to take advantage of people or lie to
them about how the experience from working on your idea is a stepping stone to
paid work, 90% of the time it won’t be.

Don’t just take my word for it here is an article about unpaid internships

In
2011, the National Association of Colleges and Employers, which conducts an
annual survey of graduating seniors, made an attempt for the first time to
measure the effectiveness of various internships—for-profit, non-profit, state
or local government, and federal—by whether they were paid or unpaid. Unpaid
internships, it turns out, provided no advantage in terms of full-time job
offer rates or starting salary, while paid internships provided a substantial
advantage. In fact, unpaid internships in government proved to be a
disadvantage in terms of job offers and in every category were a serious
disadvantage in terms of starting salary. The average student who had taken an
unpaid internship in a for-profit firm earned $18,000 less than students with
paid internships and $3,700 less than the average student who had never taken
an internship. Students who had had paid internships in the federal government
received salary offers averaging $48,668; their colleagues with unpaid federal
internships were offered only $33,127, on average.

Unpaid
work is exploitation. It is illegal, and colleges and universities should
reexamine their role in promoting it. And asRoss Perlin, the author ofIntern Nationbluntly puts it, “It’s time
to enforce the law.”